sequential daze

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Crossoverkill is go!

As mentioned in a previous post, Hoodoo from Force Magellan will be participating in a crossover/team-up with characters from a number of other superhero webcomics over the coming months. Today it all kicks off with an superlative cover drawn by Aisuku (of Hero Academy) with gorgeous colours by TV’s Mr Neil (of Dasien) – check it out here!

The first page, drawn by Essay Bee (of Fusion) will go up this coming Tuesday… I’ve seen it already and have to say it is awesome, awesome stuff. I should add that the extremely nifty series logo as seen above was designed by The Red Death (of Bad Guy High).

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Magellan has moved... magellanverse.com

The site itself is still a work in progess as I try to get my brain around ComicPress css etc but all the pages are there - including today's brand new page. It also has comment features, RSS and a drop down archive list so you can pick any page you want.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Crossoverkill

Things are still on track for Magellan updates to recommence on Wednesday October 6. Yay! At this stage updates will only be once a week because I can’t guarantee more than that – I’ve found that having more breathing space for story writing and artwork was a blessed relief over rushing to finish pages, updating late or missing weeks altogether.

There are a couple of other separate Magellan based projects in development at the moment – one of which I can reveal today… Force Magellan’s witch extraordinaire, Hoodoo, will be joining forces with other webcomic superheroes in the reality spanning epic adventure Crossoverkill which will kick off next month. Crossoverkill is a colaborative effort between myself and the talented webcartoonists of Mindmistress, Bad Guy High, Fusion, Energize, Majestic Knight and Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki… plus other guests.

Even if you’ve been reading Magellan for a while, you’d be excused if you couldn’t place Hoodoo from the previous goings on within the webcomic – so for veterans and newbies alike I’ve put together a Who is Hoodoo page to get you up to speed. She emerged as a fan fave during the Bad Karma storyline (well, three or five fans said they really liked her, so that counts as a fan fave, right?). For those of you already familiar with her you might have noticed that she has changed her costume from blue to a red theme which will debut in Crossoverkill.

I can’t give away too many details about Crossoverkill just yet, but it’s planned to kick off on October 10 and I’ll keep reminding you to check it out during it’s run.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Two steps forward... one step back...

Having spent time at the writing desk yesterday I had a bit of a rethink about some of those pages and rewrote them today. I'm not a fan of the info-dump style of story telling and found that's exactly what I had been doing. Anyway I cut out some of what I had written about the origin of the transmogrified freaks and compacted it - at the same time a fair bit of the horror element I was describing, and a tad uneasy about, yesterday has been scrubbed from it as a result. What really has to happen is that I need to sort out exactly how it's all going to finish... I've had a vague idea ever since page one, but not the exact blow by blow details. It's good though, Worst Field Trip Ever is finally coming together - and one thing's for sure, it's not going to finish under 100 pages, probably closer to 120-130. I don't want it to go on for too much longer though.

I've been reading back over a lot of older material of late and it kind of feels that some element of the earlier Magellan stories is missing from Worst Field Trip either. I think in large part it's because stories like Great Leap Forward and especially Bad Karma were more expansive with more cadets and the likes of Charisma, Billy, Sioni, Maya etc and their interaction and snarking. Some of the other cadets were meant to fill those roles in this story (Joe, Louis, Jenna, Gifford, Maya) but they've been out of commission for most of it. hmmm. hmmm. hmmm...

Also continued work on the cast page... gonna be working on that thing forever. Started to work on an improved archive page... given there are 500+ pages in the archive I think I'll be working on that for a while too!

Monday, August 23, 2010

Practicing Zen

So I was doing more work on the Cast Page today. Probably had done about an hours worth of really good, productive work; so of course I was fully engrossed in what I was doing and forgot to save for about 45 minutes or so (not every 5-10 that I do usually)... and of course the computer decided to crash meaning I lost most of that work. Many swear words were said. Then I just decided to turn it all off and walk away and forget about it. Just be Zen, not worth getting my blood in a boil over it. But I gotta say it was really disappointing.

Did some more writing on the Chapter 5 story today too. I'm now outlining how the transmogs became how they are. I think I can say that without it being a spoiler of anything. It's a fairly traumatic, horrifying sequence... how do I think of this stuff?? Sometimes I have to wonder about what goes on in my brain. Anyway, I'm happy with the progress of the story - the hiatus was needed in large part due to massive writer's block. Can't do any cartooning with that sitting in the way. Seems to be mostly resolved now.

Having calmed down from the earlier Cast Page disaster I decided to spend a bit more time on it later today. Instead of working on the stuff I'd lost I instead worked on the villain section: the bad, the mean and the nasty! And there sure has been some nasty pieces of work in Magellan... Master Drake, the Q'Arth demons, DragonKlaw and Miasma. I've even included the Red Path Ninja who cut a swathe through Chapter 3. Charmers one and all!

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Cast pages RULE!

Being a Sunday I've opted for a slightly less work intensive day Magellan-wise but have still done some stuff none the less! Mostly I have been working on the cast page... no wonder I have been putting it off, it is a rather time consuming enterprise. I've listed all the cadets who have shown up in some capacity at any point, including those who might have only ever been in one or two panels hundreds of pages ago. In addition to all of the freshers this also includes second, third, fourth and sixth year cadets - in total 42! Others to be added to the list include the faculty (eg Freya, Tom, etc), the academy (eg Mary/Glamour; Ken/Nitroman, etc), Force Magellan, Oz Magellan, Magellan USA and others (eg Go!Anna, Wombat-man, Brelvis, etc etc etc). All up I'm not even 25% of the way through the task but it is moving along at least. If I can do an hour a day it'll be finished before I know it... hopefully!

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Progress report

It's been a while since the last post so I thought I'd give a brief update of developments. Everything is still go for Magellan to recommence updates in October as scheduled - YAY! In the meantime I'm starting to fix up a few other things that have been outstanding for a loooong time... mundane things like the cast page and consolidating the content across all mirror sites; and exciting things such as a little undertaking which, at this stage, I will only refer to mysteriously as "Project Omicron" (!) and a few other items which I won't get into listing just at the moment. But I figured it would be good to give a daily run-down of Magellany goodness to get me psyched and to get you psyched about the return of the comic on October 6...!

So, for instance, I spent a fair bit of time working on Project Omicron today... drafting up my fifth page to date. I really want to tell you more about this and I will right at the end of September, I expect you might be pleasantly excited! Also today I have finally pulled the finger out and started to seriously look a proper cast page - all previous attempts have been miserable, miserable failures. In past this has been because there are so many characters in Magellan that every time I attempt to identify them in even the most rudimentary way my brain melts down and I pathetically give up. I'm determined to see it through this time - in part the problem has been the format but I do believe I have hit on a solution this time so we shall see.